karplus@ce.ucsc.edu (Kevin Karplus) (12/05/90)
I was the one who got the ridiculously poor time for the
echo 2^5000/2^5000 | /bin/time bc
on a Sparcstation SLC. The time I got is not representative of other
SLC's, but it was accurate for this one. I even repeated the
benchmark on different days, and without suntools running. I still
don't know the reason for the bad performance. We tried booting
another SLC in place of this one, to check out all the software
possibilities---it ran the trivial benchmark at a perfectly reasonable
speed. Now, mysteriously, my SLC runs at the right speed also:
15.7 real 15.1 user 0.1 sys
The systems people are all away at a conference, and so I don't know if
they fixed anything, or if simply rebooting caused the problem to go away.
Moral: Never use a trivial benchmark as an indicator of system speed.
Moral2: Even trivial benchmarks may be useful for pointing out problems.
Kevin Karplus